CREDO 000. The Cosmic Christ A Meditation on Velázquez’s Christ after the Flagellation contemplated by the Christian Soul WHO is this Christ? You, scourged, now look at me and send a thill of light to guide my prayer while You are twined and I think I am free, attired in spotless white though You are bare. An angel points the truth and guards the space, an inner sweep where meaning’s torque is tried, and agony is mitered with spare grace; the present, like a paradox, is tied. The world entire is Christ, distressed, alone, a way of painting all we see and know, the damned, the saved enjoined with laugh and moan, a metaphor chamfering loved and foe. So I’ll be hurt to heal, be bound to free, change ache to kiss and wrench eternity. Blood-stained whips of the Flagellation are near Christ as he awkwardly sits on the floor. Ropes tie his wrists to a column. From his head a ray points to a kneeling child portraying the Christian Soul at whom he gazes. A Guardian Angel bids the child to regard the Savior’s suffering. Now in the Na tion al Gallery in London, the painting was completed before 1630. Thill, torque, miter, chamfer, wrench are words from mechanical or carpentry contexts. A thill is one of the pair of shafts on either side of a draft animal pul ling a cart. Torque is that which enables rotational force. A miter is an oblique cut in wood to join against another surface similarly cut; it is also the ancient Jewish headdress of the high priest and the hat of a Christian bishop. To chamfer is to cut at an angle, usually 45 degrees. To wrench is to twist forcibly or wrest something. Who . . . ?: The sonnet proposes an answer to this question >notes for «Postmodern Faith + No, Maybe I’m Rumi drunk». Our culture is often immersed in fantasy films. Many buy costumes for comic book conventions. People adopt fantasy dress and “get into” their mythic characters. Folks are moved by and comfortable enacting scenes from Batman, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and such, but scoff at religious stories, though many religious figures are exellent exemplars of how to live. Shelley can apostrophize “O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,” a therapist can place a client’s long dead-and-buried father on a chair and ask the client to talk to talk about their relationship, a lover in orgasm can exclaim O God!, but if folks, using the creative power of imagination to approach Ultimate Reality, call on Jesus, they are regarded as superstitious. Can we each be, as suggested by James Joyce’s 1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch5, a “priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever-living life”? Yielding to Reality (another word for God) as Christ does, is a form of amor fati: “to trust in God is to welcome anything that can happen” —Western Missouri Episcopal Bishop Arthur A Vogel, Body Theology, 1993, p82. Δ This sonnet is ekphrastic. copyright © 2015, 2025 by Vern Barnet, Kansas City, MO |